Rommel Santor Back-end / Front-End / Full-Stack Web Developer

About Me

I've been fascinated with creating things since childhood and once I got my hands on my
first computer I started teaching myself computer programming and just ran with it.
My career, passion, and past-time is designing and implementing smart software, but since
I became a father of two amazing little boys, they are the light of my life and the reason
my working hours have shrunken significantly.

Web Software Engineer

My expertise is with all aspects of Web software development with heavy emphasis on both
back-end to front-end, usually from scratch.

Coding and Writing

Take a look at edWEcate.com which I'm slowly building into
a repository of educational web development articles and useful code snippets. Right now it's
mostly AngularJS because that's what I'm heavy into learning at the moment, but it's intended
to be for general purpose web development learning.

In the past I would sometimes write about interesting software experiences in my coding log.
You may also find useful the jQuery plugins I have written.

Recent and Notable Projects

I was tasked by Hyperloop-One to create an offline micro-site to be run with specific hardware
projecting onto an 80"x60" tabletop surface turned into a touch-interactive interface. Because of
that, it is best viewed at 800x600. This was intended to be part of a presentation in Dubai, where
the first production Hyperloop tube may be built, bringing Elon Musk's vision to life.

This is an in-progress single-page application that I'm building almost exclusively with AngularJS on the front-end. The site is meant
for myself and other developers to help educate one another by sharing short, concise articles/tutorials about various software technologies.

Currently just an introductory holding page, a rather complex task was implementing
self-writing handwritten text. It was a challenge to balance text quality
against image file size and determining how best to actually animate the text.

WordPress plugin to easily create rich, interactive image maps where small regions of a larger image can be interacted with
using an elegant UI. These regions can pop up an information box when clicked and while hovering with your mouse can display
a custom HTML panel.

Successful online store for popular blog required custom e-commerce shopping cart solution built from scratch. Includes
affiliate program wherein third-party websites can have custom-skinned shops that are hosted and have orders fulfilled
by the primary. Affiliate shops include: Boing Boing,
Fark

Don't Quit Your Day Job

1997 to 2010 I worked in the airline industry building software applications involved
with the revenue accounting side of the business.

2010 to present I have worked for a great real estate group based in Newport
Beach, California as Director of Software Development. I spend my days engineering and developing
from scratch all of the company's large scale web-based software systems, from their public facing
web sites to their back-end business management system.

Freelance/Consulting

2006 I joined VideoSift.com as IT
Director and built the custom PHP-based CMS that still powers the site today. I continue working
on software and act as system administrator on the four servers on which VideoSift resides.
VideoSift receives approximately 1.5 million unique visitors per month.

2009 I build TeeVirus.com which was a
very interesting community-based e-commerce site, wherein members could submit their own custom
t-shirt designs. Other members would vote on the quality of the design, and those with the best
ratings would make it into the store available for purchase, earning the designer a commission for
each sale.

2009 I built from scratch a brand new, much more powerful PHP-based
MVC
framework I call VosaPHP. Using the new framework, I built over the course of several months the
massive custom shopping cart system referred to as NeatoCart, which powers Neatorama.com's storefront,
NeatoShop.com. More than just a simple
shopping cart, NeatoCart was also developed to support affiliate shops skinned and promoted by
third-party websites. (Affiliate shops include Fark
and Boing Boing.) In addition, I am Neatorama's
system administrator, managing the 8 servers on which its collection of sites run. Neatorama receives
over 3 million unique visitors per month.

2010 I used VosaPHP to build a software system for neatohub.com, another Neatorama
property, which is a link-exchanging hub similar to 2leep.com.
It functioned by allowing select third-party bloggers to embed a widget on their websites which would
rotate links from other third-party neatohub blogs. It promised and delivered a 2:1 ratio, giving
participants 200% of the traffic they sent into neatohub.

2011 I was contracted to build from scratch a very large scale blogging platform to
replace WordPress for my client's high traffic blog. This is a work still in progress that is likely
to take at least six months to complete.

2012 After about 8 months of development with VosaPHP, the new
HOMGroup.com website was launched. It's the public-facing
company website for HÔM | Sotheby's International Realty that supports instant MLS property searching
among many other features. Still in development are agent websites that will all be driven by the same back-end
system to provide to HÔM Group agents fully-customizable real estate websites.

2012 After about 8 months of development with VosaPHP, the new
HOMGroup.com website was launched. It's the public-facing
company website for HÔM | Sotheby's International Realty that supports instant MLS property searching
among many other features. Still in development are agent websites that will all be driven by the same back-end
system to provide to HÔM Group agents fully-customizable real estate websites.

If you're wondering, yes, this page is this plain on purpose. I like simple. Plus, the shoemaker's children and all that. : )

Other Stuff

Convert Vietnamese Character Codes
-
Use this tool to type normal characters (found on a US keyboard) into Vietnamese characters and also
into the corresponding HTML character codes. This is useful whether you are just typing some text and you'd
like to paste the raw Vietnamese characters into something like an email or if you need to paste the HTML
entities into something like a web page.

From the Archives

I came across this old program I wrote a few years ago (in 2005). It's a desktop application that
I was toying with as a very simplified version of an MP3 playlist editor and MP3 player.
My goal was to make it simple and unobtrusive (see the image below) and in its current unfinished form, I
think I achieved that. The player is tiny and can be hidden/controlled (play, pause, previous, next) in the system
tray. Download, unzip, and give it a try if you're up to it: LMEdit.zip.

A simple click on that tray icon will pause/unpause. This is essential if you're at work and need to pause without delay.

Here's another neat old app I wrote back in 2003. It's a binary clock and aside from telling time, its
main purpose is to illustrate how geeky cool you are to anyone who sees it on your computer screen.
Download it: binclock.zip. Double-click to change the color of the virtual LEDs
and hit ESC to close it.